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5.0 MUSICAL ANALYSIS
This section examines four of Casulana’s pieces that reveal the many ways in which Casulana
musically expresses her own understanding of sexuality through music and texts, and emphasizes
the point of unity and togetherness in love versus the climactic release signaling the end of sex
and the separation of partners. Before embarking on detailed analyses of particular songs, I
would like to briefly mention a few distinguishing characteristics of Casulana’s style. First, as
Thomasin LaMay has noted, Casulana’s stylistic choices, her uses of musical tropes, her choice
of poetic texts, and the techniques that permeate her works are similar to those used by her peers,
such as Lasso. 61 It is her specific usage of these musical and poetic tools that separate her from
her contemporaries. It is the fact that Casulana displays mastery of the “musical cliché” and tools
of the late sixteenth-century madrigal, but uses them in non-conventional ways or eschews their
use altogether that convinces LaMay, and myself, that Casulana was a highly educated and
skilled composer with a specific vision, utilizing the tools of her trade to express her message.
Thankfully, she has given us the clues to decode her message. Through her dedication to Isabella
de’Medici-Orsina, Casulana invites us to treat her works as deliberate attempts to show the
61 Thomasin LaMay, "Composing from the Throat: Madalena Casulana's Primo libro de
madrigali, 1568," in Musical Voices of Early Modern Women, 365-398 (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2005), 367.
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